Lauren Feiner

Alison describes it as “a nice feature” for Facebook users who want it but no longer the “main character.”

That’s why Facebook created the friends tab to consolidate posts from users’ connections in one place. As Facebook now recommends more posts and videos from content creators and other accounts users aren’t connected with, Alison says that if a user really wanted to see every post from their friends in the regular feed, “you might have to scroll through 10,000 posts,” even if there’s only 10-20 new friend posts to see.

Facebook recently introduced a friends tab to try to recreate the feeling of scrolling your News Feed circa 2006. Alison says they think “there are some features from the very early days of Facebook and social networking that could become more interesting again” as apps including Facebook move toward public, algorithmically-recommended content. He describes it as an “experiment or a bet that we’re making to almost bring a little bit of nostalgia to Facebook as the core experience goes away from friends.”

In an interview published in October 2022, Alison told Wired’s Steven Levy that “Facebook is still at its core about friends and family.” But Alison testifies that if he were to redo the interview today, “I would acknowledge that there are a large number of people who are not using Facebook to connect with friends and family.” He adds that the world has changed so much that “we are seeing that not to be as true today as it felt two and half years ago when this interview took place.”

This was true even as the app built out its discovery engine, which powers algorithmic recommendations of content from users who are connected with one another, Alison testifies. The FTC is using Alison’s testimony to establish that in the past few years and through today, a sizable number of users still come to Facebook to connect with their friends, and the company recognizes this even as it expands into other use cases. Still, Alison says, Facebook now thinks about facilitating connections as inclusive of people users don’t know in real life, including content creators.

Not everyone who joins Facebook these days does so to find their friends on the service, Alison says. He testifies there’s a “growing” number of people who join the app with no friends, and don’t see any friend content on the app. Meta has argued that connecting with friends is an increasingly smaller portion of what users come to its apps for. The FTC says that as an absolute number, there’s still a sizable number of users who do want to connect with friends, and Facebook and Instagram are virtually the only games in town.

Alison downplays how much users care about connecting with their Facebook friends versus other potential connections, like content creators. “I have friends I haven’t seen in 30 years or I met once at a party that I don’t care about,” he says.

It’s not enough to look at what users say they want from Facebook, Alison says, you also have to look at what their actions tell you about what they want. Just because users say in surveys they want to see more friend content, doesn’t mean that’s how it plays out. “When people actually got more friend content on Facebook they visited Facebook less,” he testifies.

Alison is expected to be one of the FTC’s last major witnesses in its case-in-chief. The FTC’s lead attorney Dan Matheson is driving home the point that Meta knows that people want to see posts from their friends when they come to Facebook, by looking at a 2021 internal presentation where it found in a survey that “3 of the 4 top user pain points were related to friend content.”

During redirect, Hemphill testifies that some of the points Hansen made about his analysis weren’t relevant to his findings of Meta’s alleged anticompetitive behavior. He counter’s Hansen’s charge that he thinks he knows better than the business people at Meta. “They’ve got their expertise and I’ve got mine,” he says.